Misunderstanding, distrust, lack of genuine consultation. These are some of the words that I hear the most from various public and private stakeholders during my regular missions to developing countries.

From Bamako to Ulan Bator, where I am writing this post, the relentless echo of grievances points to the fact that the government doesn’t understand – or want to listen to – the private sector, and therefore doesn’t trust it. And likewise, the private sector sees public authorities as often incompetent, corrupt and an impediment to competitiveness and wealth creation.

While generalizing is a dubious exercise, the similarity and recurrence of complaints across the globe warrants deeper digging.

The issue of trust in policymaking is a complex field of study. The origin of mistrust of the private sector by the government in many developing countries is embedded in the socio-political culture and economic history of the state.
That being said, it is now rare to find a government that categorically denies the contribution of the private sector to the economic development of a nation. About 90 percent of the jobs are created by the private sector in the developing world, and about 50 percent of those are created by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, as José Juan Ruiz from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has written, “Policymakers realize that they need to access the deep knowledge held by the private sector in order to learn about market failure and formulate the right policies to address them.”

On the other hand, the private sector wants a stable and transparent regulatory environment in which to operate. It doesn’t want more regulations, but better regulations that will protect its investments. For that, it needs the government to listen and act in a way that will create an enabling business environment. Building trust is hard work.

Differences between public and private stakeholders certainly exist, but so do commonalities. It never takes long for parties to acknowledge that there is a clear common ground to strive for: sustainable economic development that should lead to inclusive growth. That, in turn, will spur job creation and revenue collection for the state. That’s an irrefutable win-win scenario.

On April 24, 2013, a building called Rana Plaza in Dhaka came crashing down on thousands of workers, killing more than 1,100 and injuring more than 2,500 individuals. Unlike any other building collapse, this received widespread international attention - and continues to do so - because the building housed factories that sewed garments for many European and American clothing brands. As a result, a chunk of blame for the collapse and deaths was placed on retailers and brands that outsourced their work to Bangladesh, and particularly Rana Plaza.

Since the tragedy, these retailers and companies, both big and small, utilized several brand reputation management strategies. This, in turn, impacted the policies of the garment industry in Bangladesh. Primarily, two retailer blocs, The Accord and The Alliance, emerged which have created their own local and international dynamics.

The Accord is a legally binding agreement that has been signed by many European and North American companies and allows for factories to be vetted and shut down in case of non-compliance with safety standards. The Alliance, signed by North American groups such as Walmart and JC Penny, however, does not guarantee any such protections and allows companies to use their own rules with any legal requirements.

Interestingly, many companies who are either part of The Alliance or The Accord, choose not to publicise their participation in such agreements on their own websites. This allows them minimize any attention that could turn into criticism while still taking part in initiatives in case there ever is an inquiry from media, regulators, or other interested parties.

In the state of Chiapas, Mexico — where nearly 1 million people live in moderate to extreme poverty — bus fares have been too high, and the availability of buses has been limited. Over four years, consumers on a single route have paid $2.5 million more than necessary. Tortillas in states across Mexico are more expensive than they need to be. In one state, firms overcharge for road construction by an estimated 15 percent, making it difficult to provide the high-quality transport services for cargo and construction materials that are necessary to build a logistics hub to diversify the state economy beyond petroleum. Another state has a very dynamic economy, hosting a greater density of industrial parks than comparable states. Given the positive spillover effects — industrial activity boosting local employment, demand, and purchasing power — the state expected growth in retail markets. Yet, stores have not been opening. Yet another state relies on tourism to generate business opportunities and jobs, including for poor people. However, until recently, tourists found that commercial establishments in the state’s primary municipality closed in the evenings and at night, often preventing them from going shopping.

What do these examples have in common? Local barriers to competition.

In the past few years, the Mexican Federal Competition Authority (COFECE) and Better Regulation Authority (COFEMER), internationally recognized institutions, as well as the World Bank Group, have pointed out that subnational regulations restrict competition in local markets. In many municipalities in Mexico, regulations and government interventions allow market incumbents to deny entry to new firms, to coordinate prices, to impose minimum distances between outlets, or to grant incumbents exclusive rights to artificially protect their dominant position. In total, a lack of vigorous marketplace competition costs the Mexican economy about one percentage point of GDP growth each year – a shortfall that affects the country’s poorest households by an estimated 20 percent more than its richest households. Most countries, however, have never systematically scrutinized local barriers to competition.

To address such issues effectively, competition policy experts from the World Bank Group’s Trade & Competitiveness Global Practice have developed an innovative tool – the Subnational Market Assessment of Competition (SMAC) – to systematically identify, prioritize and support the removal of local barriers to competition. (The SMAC is built from the World Bank Group Markets and Competition Policy Assessment Tool, or MCPAT.) The World Bank Group designed the SMAC to prioritize the reform of the rules and practices that most severely prevent healthy competition in the primary sectors for each state’s economic development.

Endemic violence also translates into less productivity, poorer health outcomes and high security costs. The cumulative cost of violence is staggering—up to 10% of GDP in some countries—with negative long-term consequences on human, social, economic, and sustainable development.

The good news is that violence can be prevented. For example, cities like Medellin in Colombia and Diadema in Brazil have dramatically reduced homicide rate over the last few decades, thanks to tailored solutions backed by robust data analysis and a “whole-of-society” approach.

In this video, we will discuss why violence is an important development issue, how countries and cities can effectively fight violence and crime, and what the World Bank and its partners are doing to ensure security and opportunity for all—especially youth and the urban poor.

The summer is a time for relaxed chats in my Brixton office. This week it was with a seasoned NGO campaigner who’s been on a break and wondering about re-entry into the UK/global development and environment campaign scene at the research-y end. Where are the gaps and potential niches that a bright, reflective, experienced campaigner-turned-researcher could help to fill? Here’s a few that came up, inevitably influenced by How Change Happens and attendant reading.

Implementation Gaps: A lot of successful campaigning targets the gap between policy and practice – what the government or the law has said vs. what is happening in reality. It may not have the intellectual appeal of starting with a clean sheet and saying ‘if I ruled the world, I would do X’, but the chances of getting somewhere are much higher. So how about a guide to IGap campaigning – how to identify them, work out which ones are the most promising, case studies of success, questions to ask etc?

Positive Deviance: I’m getting increasingly obsessed with this as a huge potential addition to the development repertoire. Instead of jumping in and opening a project or campaign, start by looking for the positive outliers that already exist on any given issue. Go and study them, and then use social learning to spread the message. The outsider acts as a facilitator, not a ‘doer/intervenor’. But all the positive deviance examples I’ve seen refer to programming – tackling on-the-ground problems like child malnutrition in Vietnam. What would a PD-based campaign look like? Go out and identify existing positive outliers on tax evasion, respect for human rights, or smallholders in value chains, then build a campaign to scale them up?

“Globalization and technological change create huge challenges for modern economies, but they are not uncontrollable forces of nature. The economy we have is the economy we choose to build. It is time to make different choices, and show that capitalism can be remade.” — Prof. Mariana Mazzucato of the University of Sussex and Prof. Michael Jacobs of University College London, the editors of “Rethinking Capitalism.”

The shadows lengthen and the daylight shortens amid these elegiac end-of-summer evenings — but there’s a palpable feeling nowadays, in Washington and other capitals, that we’re approaching not just the sunset of a season, but the twilight of an era.

In this insolite interim, the fraught phrase of Antonio Gramsci comes to mind: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot [yet] be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Second: Diagnosing how a phase of economic history may have run its course, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz (a former Chief Economist of the World Bank) in Project Syndicate asserts that the laissez-faire approach to globalization has reached its (il)logical conclusion: “The failure of globalization to deliver on the promises of mainstream politicians has surely undermined trust and confidence in the ‘establishment.’ . . . Neoliberals have opposed welfare measures that would have protected the losers [of globalization]. But they can’t have it both ways: If globalization is to benefit most members of society, strong social-protection measures must be in place. The Scandinavians figured this out long ago; it was part of [their] social contract. . . . Neoliberals elsewhere have not – and now, in elections in the US and Europe, they are having their comeuppance.”

Third: A series of insightful columns by Martin Sandbu in The Financial Times – tracing an “insurrection [that] has been a long time coming” – explores the links among economic stress and social-class anxiety that provoked this year’s social eruption: “Over the past generation, the trajectory of the white working class has no doubt changed the most for the worse, compared with the previous generation.”

Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Policy Program and the Center on Children and Families at Brookings released a study on multidimensional poverty and race in America. The study shows why it’s important to look at poverty through the dimensions of low household income, limited education, lack of health insurance, concentrated spatial poverty, and unemployment, and why we should consider ways to de-cluster and reduce the links between them.

And while nature’s fury does not distinguish between urban and rural areas, a large majority of disaster losses are concentrated in cities, where they disproportionately affect the poor. This creates a great challenge for low and middle-income countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 200 million people—1/3 of the population—live in informal settlements, where most dwellings don’t comply with construction codes and home insurance is non-existent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, LAC’s informal districts also account for the majority of disaster-related deaths in the region.

Defeatist demagoguery marred the 2016 election season, and it continues to resonate with many beleaguered voters in advanced Western economies, who dread the gloom-and-doom scenarios sketched by narrow-minded nationalists. For reassurance about positive strategies for economic renewal, try a dose of optimism about urban “hotspot hustle and cutting-edge cool” – thanks to a book that champions smart public policies, delivered through an activist approach to Competitiveness Strategy.

Scapegoating globalization and inflaming fears of job losses and wage stagnation, populists have harangued all too many voters into a state of paralysis or passivity. Lamenting the loss of a long-ago era (if ever it actually existed) of economic simplicity, nativists and nationalists have been conjuring up illusions about an era when inward-looking economies were (allegedly) somehow insulated from global competition.

The era of “making things smart” has replaced the era of “making things cheap” – meaning that industries no longer face a “race to the bottom” of competing on costs but a “race to the top” of competing on creativity. Knowledge-intensive industries, and the innovation ecosystems that generate them, create the “Smartest Places” that combine hotspot hustle and cutting-edge cool.

Those optimistic themes may sound unusual to election-year audiences in struggling regions, which are easy prey for demagogues manipulating populist fears. Yet those ideas are certainly familiar to readers at the World Bank Group, where teams working on innovation, entrepreneurship and competitiveness have long helped their clients shape innovation ecosystems through well-targeted policy interventions that strengthen growth and job creation.

A few months ago, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador claimed hundreds of lives, left almost 28,000 people injured, and caused $1 to 3 billion worth of damage. Most human and economic losses were directly linked to the collapse of buildings: the tremor caused the destruction of an estimated 10,000 structures, many of which were located in unsafe areas or did not meet minimum safety standards.

The tragedy in Ecuador serves as a stark reminder that, in many cases, it is not earthquakes or other disasters that kill people, but failing building structures. Therefore, improving building safety will be key in protecting communities against rising disaster and climate risk.

With over a billion dwelling units expected to be built between now and 2050, focusing on new construction will be particularly important, and will help mitigate the impact of natural disasters for generations to come.

The good news is that we have the knowledge and technology to build safe, resilient structures. But, more often than not, this knowledge is not put into practice due to insufficient or poorly-enforced regulation, as well as a lack of incentives.

In this video, Ede Ijjasz and Thomas Moullier explain why building safety will play a critical role in enhancing disaster resilience, and discuss concrete recommendations on how to get there.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="name" content="Safer buildings will help us mitigate the impact of natural disasters"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="description" content="A few months ago, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador claimed hundreds of lives, left almost 28,000 people injured, and caused $1 to 3 billion worth of damage. Most human and economic losses were directly linked to the collapse of buildings: the tremor caused the destruction of an estimated 10,000 structures, many of which were located in unsafe areas or did not meet minimum safety standards. The tragedy in Ecuador serves as a stark reminder that, in many cases, it is not earthquakes or other disasters that kill people, but failing building structures. Therefore, improving building safety will be key in protecting communities against rising disaster and climate risk. With over a billion dwelling units expected to be built between now and 2050, focusing on new construction will be particularly important, and will help mitigate the impact of natural disasters for generations to come. The good news is that we have the knowledge and technology to build safe, resilient structures. But, more often than not, this knowledge is not put into practice due to insufficient or poorly-enforced regulation, as well as a lack of incentives. In this video, Ede Ijjasz and Thomas Moullier explain why building safety will play a critical role in enhancing disaster resilience, and discuss concrete recommendations on how to get there."&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="duration" content="283"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="thumbnail" content="https://cfvod.kaltura.com/p/619672/sp/61967200/thumbnail/entry_id/1_v46idd8g/version/100051/acv/241"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="width" content="690"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span itemprop="height" content="400"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;